Read what we found


Just four days ago I got an email from Scott Karp suggesting that his Web startup might have some tools that could make covering an election interesting — really interesting.

More emails … phone calls … more emails … phone calls. The result: An idea to let some savvy political followers (except me) find links to the best stories out there and make a list of them that lets readers get the benefit of their foraging and expertise.

Who the hell is Scott Karp? Folio: mag tagged him as one of the 40 most influential people in publishing in 2007. He left his day job as director of digital strategy for the publisher of The Atlantic magazine last year to devote his full energies (and then some) to a startup called Publish2.com.

And he’s widely known in journalism/media circles as one of the most thoughtful writers on technology and media with his Publishing 2.0 blog.

Karp laid out the election linking plan in a blog post today in which he also invited other media organizations to get in on the campaign.

Here’s how it’ll work at the Tennessee level. A group of excellent bloggers and a couple of journalists who should know better have started collecting links to interesting articles and blog postings on the Tennessee election. You’ll soon see the results as a headline list of links that will update as new items are “bookmarked.”

Think of it as a list of the best things people have found to read about the Tennessee primary because that’s exactly what it is.

You’ll find the list on knoxnews and on the sites of the participating bloggers soon.

News Sentinel reporter and blogger Michael Silence was tapped to find some folks that would be interested in doing the heavy lifting in the project. He found some good ones: Newscoma, R. Neal, Russ McBee, Joe Powell, Ben Cunningham, Bob Krumm, and Les Jones.

Silence and I will be aboard as well. How the ride will be is anybody’s guess. It’s an experiment and it’s a bit out there as far as “news coverage” of an election. I hope you give it a look and give us some feedback on whether you find it useful.